F1 2016 Nyyyyyyyommming By On August 19th

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F1 2016 [official site] will arrive on August 19th, smack bang in the middle of the current Formula 1 racing season, Codemasters announced today. That means you could play along with a fair few races while watching them on television, I suppose. You’d get to tell your mates “Well, actually, I had the fastest time in the Japanese Grand Prix but due to a minor technicality…” then trail off as you turn away to sip your drink.

For now, you can check out two new gameplay videos with professional racers taking a flying lap round F1 2016’s recreation of the European Grand Prix’s Baku street circuit:

Here’s Daniel Ricciardo of Red Bull Racing having a crack, talking about which bits of the new circuit in Azerbaijan look fun:

While Jolyon Palmer of Renault Sport is a bit more practical:

So what’s new in this year’s instalment? Beyond new cars, circuits, teams and whatnot, F1 2016 is introducing a new career mode and bringing back the safety car (the ‘racedad’, if you want to get technical) and virtual safety car (disappointingly just a dashboard display).

“Flying lap” sounds like a cracking way to swear politely. Hey kids: tell your headteacher you don’t give a flying lap what they think, then smugly insist they can’t punish you because actually it was a compliment – you were saying they’re so good at driving they could be a professional racer. Just remember that this dangerous game means you can’t object if they call you a right little James Hunt.

14 Comments

Sometimes I forget the other drivers are real people… I genuinely can’t imagine what it’s like losing to the same 1 , or 2, or 3 drivers week in and week out. Nothing like feeling like ‘filler’ all the time.

Quite excited for this game though! Time to bring out the old steering wheel and pedals and be ‘filler’ while losing to the same 1, or 2, or 3 drivers everyday!

Literally only 3 drivers won last year. And when you consider two of them (Hamilton and Rosberg) are on the same team it’s even worse for the rest of the pack… Kind of sad when you think about it. I still love F1 though, don’t get me wrong!

Looking at F1 historically though, it’s unfortunately the norm that only the same 1-4 drivers will win races consistently during a championship.

There has more or less always been one or two manufacturers who dominate everything. Things get more even as the other manufacturers gradually catch up.

However as soon as one of them manages to innovate or take full advantage of some new vehicle rules set by FIA, the whole circle starts again: domination -> eventual catching up by other teams -> new rules/innovation -> domination etc.

Unofficially the main purpose of the lower teams is to serve as training ground for a driver’s eventual climb to Mercedes, Red Bull or Ferrari.

I blame these issues on the extremely uneven, and downright shady, distribution of Formula One earnings by FIA. The current system is clearly not sustainable, and I would not be surprised if the number of cars on track will shrink even further in the future.

As a side-note, having the same 1-4 people win everything in a championship is not unique to Formula One, it’s quite common in Nascar, MotoGP, SBK, WTCC, DTM and many other motorsports. So that itself is not unusual. What is unusual is having one team lead a race by 30 seconds or more, that’s quite extreme.

I really would love to get back into an F1 game – haven’t played since 2013 – but listening to those horrible, deep, groaning v6 engines just makes me sad. The excitement of the high pitched whine is gone, and so has the magic, for me anyway.

I encourage people complaining about the V6 engines to grow up. If you want car porn, go to Goodwood – the rest of us are just trying to enjoy the modern competition for what it is. Besides, 21st century F1 wasn’t a great listening experience before the engine change. I don’t miss the V8’s for a second, they were about as much fun to listen to as Ned Beatty being forced onto all fours and doing his best pig squeal.

The issue for me is that Codemasters’ main goal is to make pretty games for high-end PCs, content only seems to be a secondary concern, and accessibility for people with medium PCs is more or less ignored. The latter is in stark contrast to sim developers like Reiza, Sector3 and ISI.

This is not surprising though, since making a racing game look pretty is the best way to capture a mainstream audience, people who wouldn’t otherwise play a racing game. Yet given Codemasters’ financial trouble last year, even that does not seem to have been enough. They probably faced too much competition from Project Cars.

Since getting the license to make F1 games Codemasters have not done much with it. By now I would have expected them to add Formula 3,4 and/or Formula E to the package. Alternatively added a whole bunch of classic F1 content.

Compare this to Milestone’s MotoGP, SBK and WRC games, where they added all the related classes in one big package. It’s odd that a smaller studio like Milestone can pull this off, while Codemasters can’t.

Sorry, but August is far too late.
Just release last year’s game at the beginning of the season (with any gameplay updates made since the previous release) and gradually update the liveries/performance/sounds/tracks/driver lineups as you go.

…and how about an upgrade path for people who bought last year’s game?

…and classic cars/tracks as well? The 2013 version let you drive round Brands Hatch – loads more fun than driving in straight lines in Baku!

Late to the party, I know. Stuff the V6 versus V8 sound argument, what’s that bloody high-pitched ~10kHz noise about?

It’s in both Danny Ric’s and Palmer’s videos, and it’s not from the mic; it consistently comes on as the revs build in 3rd gear and up, and drops off when braking down into 2nd. It’s also got nowt to do with whether the driver’s talking or not.

The waterfall display on a spectrogram app reckons it’s about 10.2kHz, and the trace shows it coming and going clear as day.

I know there’s some higher-pitched turbo whine that goes on in the post-2013 cars, but it’s a constant pitch regardless of engine speed in 3rd gear and above, and is painful as all hell.